Guild Wars 2

Hey all,

I’m looking into the combat degen resulting in too heavy a gating of Celestial Avatar in PvE situations; from what I saw over the weekend it seemed overly restrictive in open world battles. If this continues it then the degeneration when out of combat is likely to be removed.

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I was looking through Streamlined Kits and the effective loss of swiftness uptime there was an unintended consequence of Kit Refinement being packed together with Speedy Kits. I’ve gone ahead and changed the swiftness from Streamlined Kits to a 20s duration.